Duality
by Ranekaera
Summary: A new menace threatens the shinigami world and no one there can stop it. A new and unusal plan is put together, involving one human woman, to create a child to bring salvation to the balance of everything CHAPT 13 UP AU!
1. Catatonic

Okay, this is my first anime fic EVER so be gentle. At first I hated anime with a passion for it's non-realsitic qualities that and it's boring stupid plot lines, like inuyasha and fucking naruto, fuck that shit. Death note is where it's at.

Once my boyfriend very wonderfully pointed out that not all anime looks like hello kitty exploded over everything, I decided to write this. PLEASE REVIEW!!

Once again, I shall express my hate of anime that used to be cool but has been "dumbed down" to be desencitized and "fit for the american children" FUCK that shit, anime USED to be cool, now it's SHITE. ah well, I've vented and feel better now, so here's my fic for death note. It will take place mostly in the Shinigami realm. I've taken a few liberties, but for the most part, I hope I've stayed true. Feel free to review and correct me or give me suggestions!!

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_HOW TO USE IT 1: Any human whos name is written in this death note will die_

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Her name was Lauren McKinnon. She was 20 years old. She was female. And she was pregnant. This was all she knew. Everything else in her mind that was or could be had been erased and nothing anyone did could coax it out. She did not know her ffamily. Her friends. Anyone.

She had a few sparse memories, but nothing conclusive. The father of her child. She didn't know. She couldn't remember. Her mind was forever after a blank.

She sat in a rocking chair in an old bedroom, a yellow wool blanket on her lap, staring out the window at the setting sun. From various other parts of the house, she could hear sounds from the other inhabitants, but they didn't bother her. She payed it no mind- all analytical reasoning had gone as well. She was near catatonic.

She could remember one thing though... it was... strange... dark and blurred, but she definitely remembered a face. A horbile face reminiscent of a clown or a joker. He had laughed at her.

His laughing, horrible face haunted what fragmented dreams she now had, a terrible caricature of the porcelain clownes littering her bedroom. She could remember liking clowns since childhood, but now she hated them. That face... and bones... she could remember bones and dust... voices she could not recognize and a deep, penetrating fear that froze her to the spot, like a deer caught in headlights.

She shook her head numbly to clear these images away and stared as the dog outside sniffed his way around the yard. She could not remember her dog's name. She had owned him for many many years. She couldn't remember his name or if he had ever even had one. She hated herself for what she had become.

The doctors said she was getting beter, but she knew they were lying. Everything had a rosy tint to it now, faces and outlines and objects, all bloody and hazy, as if seen through a thin red silk screen. She was slowly going insane, she knew it. This was her punishment for... something. But what?! If only she could remember!!

Inside her, the baby gave her kindeys a joyful kick. There was something that didn't feel right. She felt like the baby inside her was a parasite of some sort, not simply gaining nourishment from what sustained her but _feeding_ off of her, taking and draining more than just nourishment. Whenever it kicked, she felt pain. Sometimes there was a strange, shifting movement that shouldn't be there, how she knew she didn't know.

As for her family...

The poor girl had come stumbling in one night about five months ago, chalk white and seemingly near death, covered in dirt and sweat and what looked like blood and mumbling incoherantly about clowns and skeletons and mummies. They had taken her immediately to a doctor, who had pronounced her pregnant and semi-catotonic. She was useless now. A mere incubator for a bastard child.

And the child... ye gads, the child! Her last check up with the gyencologist had revealed such abnormalities that the doctor in attendance had gone pale, crossed himself, muttered a gibberish prayer in Yiddish and left the room.

The child appeared to have horns.

Lauren's mother didn't typically make unjust judgements, but she knew one thing for sure. She did not want to see her grandchild born.

In the butter yellow room decoraetd with clowns and unicorns, the silent girl with the baby isnide rocked in her chair and said nothing. Inside of her, the baby kicked again.

The baby was five months along, female, and had no conscious as of yet, yet she lived. She fed off her mother as all babies did. Occasionally, she sucked her tiny thumb. The nails were small, but wickedly sharp and pointed. Sometimes she did sommersaults to amuse herself. She knew nothing of the outside world or what would become of her or where she came from. She was innocent.

Lauren continued to sit in her chair. For the rest of that day and the next and the next, into the next week, the next doctor's visit, to which only one nurse would now attend because of the images on the screen of the baby, and even into the next month, Lauren continued to sit and rock. Sometimes she stroked a cat absentmindedly. Other times she sat there and dozed. She would awaken with a start, always, with the face of the laughing Joker in her dreams.

It was December and it was snowing. The baby inside of her had ballooned her stomach to three times its normal size. She was fat. She didn't care. She had someone help her with the bathroom and dressing herself. She was getting better at moving of her own accord, but she just did not feel like it most of the time.

Towards Christmas, the baby inside her gave a kick so swift and vicious that she felt something inside of her give and suddenly she felt panicked. Her heartbeat doubled, then quickly tripled.

She was going into labor.

The baby, now two months premature for a human, opened its eyes and saw nothing but milky white, viscuous fluids, red and felt warmth. She did not like this warmth whatever it was. She was fully concious. She was ready for life.

She was ready to be.

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I actually think I'm going to like this, please review!!


	2. birthday

Okay, time for chapter two. I will probably stop writing the rules of how to use the death note soon, because I can't remember them all in order, lol. But all you avid death note fans out there probably know them already and Im only putting them in here for theatrics, so do without, lol.

No, I am not expressing my feear of childbirth through Lauren's unfortunate eventual fate. I simply thought it'd be a pretty brutal way to ... well, no spoilers, keep reading.

Please review!!

The hospital wasn't far.

Rain lashed the streets, pounding the freshly fallen snow to mush. The sky was storm gray and so far it was all Lauren was aware of seeing. The red tint had gone for the moment. All she saw was gray and shades. Colors had dimmed. It gave the whole world a grim, ashen and horribly familiar deathly apearance. Why should it seem familiar to her? She tried grasping it in her mind but she couldn't. It was like trying to hold water in her bare hands. The harder she tried to remember, the faster it trickled away.

As the car sped around another corner, Lauren fell against the woman beside her. She was older... brown hair... seemed familiar. It ust be her mother, but she couldn't remember what on called your mother. Her mind had gone blissfuly unaware again.

She was only dimly aware that the baby inside her seemed to be struggling. Were babies supposed to fight their way into the world? The inside of her thighs felt slippery and wet and her stomach suddenly siezed up, like it did when she had to go to the bathroom. The warm feeling increased. She heard an alarmed voice beside her but she wasn't concerned. For some reason, this whole episode didn;'t frighten her or worry her. She relaxed everything and simply sat there bleeding.

Lauren's mother, Mary was alarmed at the freshet of blood she saw pooling at her daughter;s feet in the backseat of the car. Her brother, who lived with them to help care for Lauren was driving.

"What is it?" he called back.

"Lauren's bleeding way too much! Go faster! I don't care if she loses this thing, but I don't want her to bleed to death!" said Mary sternly. One might have thought she was lecturing a sibling for forgetting to feed the chickens.

Her brother Frank did.

They made it to the hospital in record time. Just as the doctors and nurses had gotten Lauren into a wheelchair to get her to the delivery room, there was a god awful tearing sound, a shredding and ripping sound, juicy and wet, and blood was everywhere.

Nurses quickly rushed her to a private room away from the ER and Frank and Mary followed suit. They were trailing blood wherever they went. Lauren's expression didn't change once.

There was a thin, high pitched mewling sound from somewhere in the room, another grisly tearing sound and more blood, blacker than before and something fought its way out of Lauren and fell to the floor between her limp feet in a puddle of blood and birthing fluids. It was horribly pale and streaked with amniotic fluids. It did indeed have small, curved horns but that was all the nurse needed to see. She fainted.

Lauren glanced down at the thing on the floor that had just given birth to itself seemingly and blanched,. the first expression on her face in the whole ordeal. The horns... the eyes... the nails... wings... was it an angel or devil?

The child looked up at her weakly, on a neck too thin to support its head and she saw it was female. It made the pitiful mewling noise again and tried crawling but the process of trying to be born had tired it too much.

Despite it's terrible appearance, Lauren held her arms out weakly for her child.

Mary would have none of it. This baby was not a baby that should exist. Terribly thought sprang into her head, the first one that Laurten was still bleeding and if someone didn't do something soon, she would die of blood loss. It was best to keep her complacent until she was out of danger..

She thought faster than she had had to all her adult life.

"Frank, give her that... thing, she wants it. Cover its head and nails. I'm going to get someone in here to stop her bleeding," she said urgently, and she handed a towel to her older brother and left the room, glad to be away from the smell of blood.

Frank did as said. He had spent years in the army and had even seen war, but it was nothing to prepare him for this. His grand-niece was a monster... a demon child. Her eyes were round and wide and her face was round and cute, but her eys were a blazing, hateful orange and the horns.. the skin was ashen gray and thw wings were dust colored beneath all the blood. The whole baby seemed near death, but she was crying. It was all at once a terrible, doom-impending sound. The sound of it crying made him want to run for his OWN mother and hide his face in her skirts, like he had as a child afraid of the boogeyman.

Nonetheless, he wrapped the child in a towel or two, sure to hide the small, spiked horns protruding from the infant's head at the sides just behind the ears. What was even more hgorrible about the girl waws how she seemed to resemble both the demon and her mother. The mouth was purely Lauren, perfect and pouting.

There was a vicious red streak of a birthmark from the baby's breastbone to her stomach and what would eventually be a pubic line in later years.

He handed the baby to his niece, helping her arms around the bundle. Lauren looked down into the child's face and the baby stopped crying.

Lauren said the first word she had said sincebefore she went missing nearly 6 months ago.

She traced her finger around the splotched and mottled red-gray flesh on the girl's chest and said, "gray."

At that moment, a doctor came in, followed by a different nurse with an IV pole and some other supplies.

In the end, they weren't able to stitch Lauren up. She had lost too much blood. When Frank and Mary saw what the child had done to Lauren in order to be born, Frank's jhaw dropped.

Lauren's vagina and all the flesh around it was lost in a churned, bloody battlefield of bruised, torn flesh. He squinted and thought he made out claw marks.

"Cute kid," said one of the nurses, glancing at the baby, who was now sleeping with her eyes closed. It was a good thing, too, or the nurse wouldnt have said "cute".

"What will you name the child?" asked the doctor who had failed to save Lauren's life.

Mary had already given up on the baby. As far as she was concerned, it had killed Lauren intentionally, a small, hateful thing that only brought death. Her brother, always the sympathizer, stepped forard and took the girl away from the dead arms of her mother. He remebered the only and last word Lauren had spoken.

"Gray McKinnen," he replied.

Mary moved out later that week. She could not tolerate the baby's mewling, screechy "hungry" cry and the fact that all they fed her, all that one was supposed to feed a baby,was sicked up almost immediately. Frank could not bear to stand by as the child was taken away and undoubtedly cut up and experimented on. He felt it was what Lauren, the happy, smiling, intelligent woman he had known before her disappearance, would have wanted him to do.

He eventually found excuses not to show off the baby to anyone. She had chicken pox, she was very very sick, HE was very very sick, all sorts of reasons.

He also eventaully found something the girl wouldn't spit up after ingested. She seemed very fond of apples and bacon. At less than a week old, she was already teething. Her teeth were small and pointed and needle sharp. She was already eating solids and there was no doubt that behind those large, orange eyes lurked a horrible intelligence.

He felt her watch him as he moved around the house. He tried to keep her amused by playing with her,but she didn't seem interested. She was a strange baby, aside from the horns and wings. She only cried when she wanted smething and when she wasn't sleeping or occupying herself, she was staring out the windows, as if waiting for someone.

His answer came less than four years later, and when it did, he really wished it hadn't.

note: this is not about a shinigami being "reborn" gray is simply being born!!

Please leave a review!!


	3. A visitor

Hey, jumping right into this one

Four years later, the child had grown considerably. Gray McKinnen was a relatively healthy four year old with long, thick orange hair and the same lamp-like orange eyes, the same pale death-colored skin and the same unflinching habit of watching through the window. She had somehow taught herself to do away with her wings, which were threee times too big for her by now and looked out of place on the thin shoulders of the small girl.

Frank had gotten used to her. She could speak fully intelligable sentences by now and was incredibly smart. She had been taught to read and was even learning math. She liked reading and enjoyed music, although Frank would never know what she liked so much about the stuff called "death metal". Why a four year old who had never been exposed to it's contents would like it was beyond him.

He supposed he didn't love Gray as most parents loved their children, but he cared for her and kept her healthy. He got the feeling that a storm was coming and when it did, he wouldn't want to be around. If some unseen figure or devil person came for her, he wouldn't be able to stop them, so there was no use getting attached now.

Another thing he noticed about the girl was that although she was usually calm and very observative, she had a nasty temper. He found the cat stangled, it's head nearly severed by what looked like claw marks, after he told her point blank she was not to watch TV unless she ate her dinner. It had been a test to see what she would and couldn't eat. So far the list of things she could keep down were as followed: apples, chocolate, bacon, turkey, gravy, potatoes, corn and for some strange reason, raw walnuts. She could drink whatever she pleased with no ill affects.

It was just before her fifth birthday in December that he thought he felt something was wrong. He was coming downstairs with his bathrobe and slippers on, intending to make cofee when he stopped. Gray was talking to someone.

He walked quietly so he could hear what she was saying more clearly and was surprised to see that he couldn't understand a word she was saying. She was talking in some strange, disjointed language that sounded more like snarling and growling than talking. He had never heard her speak like it, except when she had been smaller and was hungry. He remembered all too well that shrieking, mewling cry.

He made his cofee as if he had heard nothing (A/N: For any familiars reading this, I have one thing to say. DO YOU FOLKS LIKE COFFEEE?? friends will get it, hahaha) and by the time had had sat down to the table and shaken out his newspaper, he was almost at ease once more.

_Hmm... Nicks lost again... no surprise there_ he thought, sipping his drink and flipping through the sports page.

He fet a small tug on the bottom of his bathrobe and looked over. His deep blue eyes met her bright orange ones, that perfectly matched her hair color. It was tangerine almost.

"Frank, can I go outside and play with Rem?"

He gently set his paper down. She had never talked to herself before and to his knowledge did not have any friends. Had she perhaps invented one? Rem? Well, he could humor her.

"Sure, just make sure you hide yourself as best you can," he reminded her and he returned to his paper. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a slight movement and when he turned to look again, he saw a perfectly normal four year old girl with orange eyes and horns. No wings. No claws. No fangs. How had she learned to do that??

"Rem showed me!" she said, and she smiled. She looked like Mary when she smiled like that.

She flounced off, giggling like children will, and he thought he felt somethng brush his arm. Figuring it was just a bug, he scratched his arm and again lost himself in his paper.

He didn't notice the towering white figure go floating off after Gray. He was too absorbed in the front page news article.

Gray wasn't stupid. She had known she was different ever since she could rmember, from the way people who saw her stared to the way they spoke to her, as if afraid she might bite.

She liked the way she looked. To her, her eyes were special. She could see extra good in the dark, too. She had seen Rem just that morning, as she typically awoke before her grand-uncle and Rem had explained almost everything. She understood quite a bit, actually, but since she was, after all, only four, she knew enough to know that Rem wouldn't tell her everything there was to know.

"You are part human, part Shinigami. My name is Rem," she had introduced herself.

"Shinigami? Death god?" she had asked. She knew all about shinigami. They were her favorite subject in books she was reading.

Rem had told her about the Death notes and the rules and how to hide her wings and claws and fangs. She had tried her horns, but it seemed they were a permanent part of her. Rem had then shown her what a death note looked like and even offered to show her the realm of the Shinigami, but at this point, Gray bit her lip thoughtfully. She loved her grand-uncle Frank, even if he didn't think so or even lover her back, but that was fine. As long as she knew she had a friend. What would he think if she disappeared?

"I better not, Frank might get worried. I'm just a little girl," she had replied, twirling the dirt at her feet with the tip of one shoe shyly.

Rem had offered a small smile at this point and kneeled down so they were on a level.

"Some day, when you are old enough to understand more, Gray McKinnen, I will tell you all there is to know. For now, know this; you can tell Frank what you are, but not anything else I have told you. It is for his own safety that he know _what_ you are. As for my visit, he should know nothing. Understood?" she said, not unkindly.

Gray nodded and because she felt like it, she let her claws and all back out. She felt more comfortable as such.

She ran back inside to tell Frank the news. She was special!


	4. Pepperoni, castles and dragons

Hey, here's chapter 4 and I wanted to make a couple things clear after my first and so far only review. 1: I know shinigami can't make love to humans or each other, that is why this is a fan FICTION. 2: Gray was not produced in the typical fashion, i.e. sex. This will be made clearer as the story progresses, as I said in chapter 1 I am taking a couple liberties. This story is not canon. Please stop reviewing me anonymously, I would like to spare you this boring dribble at the beginning of each chapter and instead simply reply and answer you that way.

On with the chapter. This is from Ryuk's POV.

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Ryuk sat alone on the rocky outcropping and listened to the gentle breeze that was the only thing seemingly happening in the Shinigami realm. From behind him, he could hear Guuku and Deridovely playing their stupid card and bones game but he felt no yearning to join them. Their gambling games usually ended in arguments anyway.

The others behind and the numerous hundreds below him played their games or drew in the dirt to kill time, Ryuk was enlisted for that particular day to keep watch on the little "experiment" in the human world.

From above them, the sun beat down mercilessly. It was very, very hot outside. He didn't sweat, per say but he could feel his clothes sticking to him nonetheless and he didn't like it.

Glimpses of the human world in the reflecting pool showed a small girl, perhaps five or six year old, playing on the floor with a pen and paper, writing random scribbles and drawing aimless, loopy circles. She had short bright orange hair and larger, backward-swept horns just above and behind her ears, which were normal human ears. She was human in most aspects, but Ryuk and every single shinigami in this realm knew she was not.

Another human, a larger man, came into the room and gently set a plate of food down on the carpet beside the girl and she looked up and smiled, the pale, gray-white skin of her jaw outlining her neck and the veins in it. She was a delicate child, somehow. Lamp-like orange eyes he recognized as similar in shape to his own but a different color and the sharp little teeth of Rem and the dark, almost raven-like feathered wings of he, himself.

Ryuk directed his attention closer to the paper she was scribbling on and was astonished to see what she was drawing. For a six-year-old, she was talented, he thought, smirking to himself. She was drawing a three-tiered black tower with a gate and an enormous black dragon breathing scribbled flame from its mouth. He was also astonished to see what looked like a shinigami caught in the fire. Either she had a vivid imagination or it was something she had seen somewhere.

"Hey Ryuk, why do you work so hard? What's so special about that half-breed anyway?" called Guuku from over on the ground behind him.

Ryuk turned his back for a moment, keeping his thoughts on her drawings to himself for the time being.

"Nothing special, just the only shinigami child that's ever been created in the existence of everything, Guuku. She isn't supposed to exist, that's why she's interesting," he replied sarcastically.

The Shinigami king himself had deigned her creation necessary but possibly hazardous. It was down in the rules dictated by the old man himself, no shinigami was supposed, allowed or (supposedly) able to have sex with any being ever, yet Gray had been created. How, not even he knew. He had just received the summons to the old man himself along with several others and they had been instructed to join hands and then everything had gone dark. A human had appeared in the middle of their circle, scared and young and pale. The shinigami king was powerful, so no one questioned him.

The old man had told them all the place one hand on a part of the human and this they had done and then the king himself and there had been a simple tingling sensation all through his limbs and they were told to all go back to doing whatever. The human was sent back down to her own world. Nothing was ever explained. They had just been designated a day a week each to keep watch over the child.

He only knew as much as he did because he wasn't stupid and he spent most of his time being bored finding out as much as he could whenever he was curious enough about something.

He did know this much. The shinigami king was worried about something or he wouldn't have taken such a drastic measure. There was something wrong in the balance of things and even he was a bit disconcerted. For now, the girl was far too young to know much more than Rem had been instructed to tell her.

In the end, she would have to die. Her name would go into a note and her unnatural life would have to end. It was almost a shame, really. So talented, not really beautiful, but… cute. Bright and very curious about everything and everyone. It almost made him jealous to think she took everything in like drink, questioned nothing and hated everything at times when she was angry. After the tantrum was over, she would again see things in a new light.

He settled himself down to keep watch.

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Gray was indeed drawing something she had seen in a dream once. A black tower in which someone very scary lived and a dragon that ate other shinigami if they got too close would guard the place. There was a gate and there was a shinigami in a skull mask with too many arms and chains and she didn't know who he was, but she felt she should try and draw him, too. So she did.

She ate her grilled cheese sandwich as she drew and drank her apple juice. Mmm, her sandwich had pepperoni in it. She loved pepperoni. It was a recent favorite of hers.

She had told Frank she was part shinigami immediately after the one called Rem left. She had liked Rem. She was pretty and nice and didn't talk down to her like she was a baby. She was smart for her age. She had even started school recently, and the kids all picked on her because of the "headband" she wore. She had to wear extra big contact lenses Frank had got for her to make her eyes look blue, but the others still made fun of her. She remembered what Frank had told her after coming home from first grade that day.

"Most will probably make fun of you and others will be afraid of you, but remember this. There's one person in a group of every dozen who will accept you for who you are, not what. Your only job is to find that person, and you'll be fine."

"But what if I can't find them? Or they're afraid to come out and talk to me?" she had asked.

Frank had set his coffee down at this point and scooped her up onto his lap like she saw parents do with their "normal" human children and she had felt loved.

"Then you show you aren't afraid and you approach them first and make a friend. The more friends you have, the fewer people will make fun of you. You understand? There are a lot of people in this world not worth listening to Gray, but there are good people as well as rotten. You only have to look for them. Now run along and go play," he had said and she had done just that.

Now as she sat on the floor doodling, she felt as if someone or something was watching her. Alarmed, she sat up straight and looked up at the ceiling, eyes alert and posture stiffened, ready to fight. People at school jumped her and beat her up all the time, and she tried not to get angry. She reverted to her shinigami half when she got angry and wings and claws would get far too much attention. So she just beat the anger and the shinigami down and cried inside.

Up in the Shinigami realm, Ryuk could tell he had been spotted. She knew someone was watching her, anyway. He had told the old man again and again, there was no way this kid would grow up to be normal if she kept sensing them watching her every day of her life. She would grow up to be paranoid and dangerous. At the moment, she was sweet and misguided.

Naturally, he hadn't listened, but he felt his job for today was finished. He banished the viewing pool and let the girl alone. He had to report his "findings" to the Boss man anyway. He had to know the girl was drawing the Black Tower.

As he flew off in that general direction of the Shinigami king, from far, far away in this same realm, the black dragon roared.

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PLEASE REVIEW!! I told you there was more to the plot than met the eye. You just had to wait. Thanks to "A" for his/her anonymous (insert sarcastic word emphasis here) review and for telling me all the "how to use" rules.


	5. flying lessons

Man, I am LOVING this story so far!! (is all excited) I never had so much fun writing something since I first started out n this site, and that was just Monsters Inc…. I digress, whatever. Please keep reading and review!

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12 years later

It was years and years later, and a lot of time had passed. The house in Winterport, Maine was the same as it always had been. Beige carpeting in the living room, mosaic stone tiles in the kitchen. Only the photographs on the walls showed the time passed. Now instead of family portraits of Frank and his sister Mary (who had passed away recently) and other family, there were pictures of a teenager and the old man himself (he was getting on in years, approaching 60 hard and fast) and that was all. A few were taken by himself, as no photographer on this planet would want to photograph Gray as she naturally was. She had grown and changed quite a bit now.

He was proud of her, even if she wasn't quite human.

She had graduated high school ridiculously early, at the age of 16 and had stayed on living with him in his house, but now instead of him making her lunch of grilled cheese and pepperoni, she was taking care of him.

She had the same orange hair and brilliant orange eyes and fangs, but her horns were sharper and more curved now and her fangs had grown numerous in number but no so many that she couldn't speak. Her wings had gotten bigger, more bat-like but still covered in fluffy, almost pretty black feathers. For some reason, small, almost invisible spikes had grown from her knuckles.

She had plucked one out and made a quill pen out of it for him and he used it whenever possible. It was silky smooth, didn't feel like a feather at all, and it wrote magnificently.

She had a woman's body now, had never gotten breasts and her claws were trimmed on a weekly basis. The red birthmark on her chest at birth had shrunk considerably, as he could no longer see it when she wore a swimsuit. She would never be pretty by human standards, but nonetheless, he was proud of her. She was smarter than he was, anyway, he thought chuckling to himself.

He shuffled out into the kitchen on that fine, crisp November morning and started making himself coffee. The paper was already laid out on the table for him.

"Gray??" he called through the house.

"In here, Frank, I'm just checking email," he heard her call from the rec room. Her voice had gotten a lot deeper, as well, probably the shinigami in her, but when she sang, no other sound in the world was more beautiful to him, in his opinion. Deep and melodious, it made him think maybe the world hadn't gone to hell in a handbasket yet.

He shuffled in and saw her sitting at the computer, indeed checking her email. She had her wings flat against her back instead of spread out as usual and he knew it was so he could see the monitor. He avoided the sharp horns and bent down to see closer. It was a funny e-card from one of her good friends, because her birthday was the next month.

The thing most amazing about her was her ability to charm people and make friends despite her convictions. She had numerous friends now and hadn't come home crying and beaten since that fateful day 12 years ago. He knew it was because she had taught herself to fight back, but he didn't mind. He thought women SHOULD assert themselves, or else they'd be walked on the rest of their lives, and Gray was headstrong enough for both of them, if a little childish.

In fact, she was childish a lot and had been ever since she was a child. He knew she was smarter than that, though. A diploma at 16 proved as much.

"Cute card," he said, looking at the computer screen.

"It's from Monique," she replied, smiling wistfully. Her fangs had been a difficult problem during adolescence. Confronted with having to learn a different language, they had nearly lacerated her lower lip but she had been taught to speak her second language with no problem.

She closed out of everything and stood up, stretching. As she did, he could see the outline of her ribcage before it met her pelvic bone and didn't mind. She ate enough, he knew, but for a part shinigami, (actually he didn't know much about hybrids, or if they typically existed but he had been doing research) she didn't need to eat quite as much, but she stayed thin no matter what.

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Gray stood and stretched, her wings unfolding and reaching the opposite wall. She hadn't tried flying yet but knew she would have time enough to learn eventually. She could be invisible to people if she chose to be, so it wouldn't be a problem.

She was childish and she knew it. Obnoxious, but that was fun. She didn't like being angry, though. People had a habit of getting hurt when she got angry and not because she hit them. She didn't know how they got hurt, just that three people had already died and she had no idea. She didn't own a death note, being part human and having never been to the shinigami realm so how did they die?? Frank had said on more than one occasion that when she got angry, her eyes glowed red or sometimes, white, but she never noticed it.

At any rate, she was done on the computer so she decided to go outside and write in her journal.

She told Frank where she was going and stepped outside, retracting her wings and claws so people wouldn't notice her too much. She climbed the big forked tree in the back yard and pulled her journal out of her pocket. It was black but thicker than a death note and had no writing on the cover.

She was writing about her boyfriend. Her first boyfriend ever. She knew she was in love and he loved her too, she knew it. They had been together now for about a month and were already planning on moving in together as soon as he got a job. Love was so wonderful! If only she had a car and a license! Better yet, if only she could fly, she wouldn't need either one. She laughed to herself at the thought.

She bent her head down and kept writing, her coppery hair falling on the pages. It was still thick, but had gotten even lighter in the years past. No longer carrot orange, it was more like a blonde-orange. She continued to write in her journal and finished, capped her pen and tucked it back into her pocket.

She wore a black band T-shirt from some band she didn't know and a knee length black summer skirt, thin and airy. She was moderately comfortable in what she wore.

She wanted to try flying.

She stood up, carefully steadying herself with her hands on ether tree trunk where she sat in the fork and looked down. The ground wasn't that far below her, perhaps five feet or so, but from her point of view, it wasn't a height she wanted to fall from.

She stretched her wings out (there were special holes cut into her shirt to allow for them) she experimented by flapping them a few times. A feather dropped to the ground and her wings made a deep _whooshing_ noise. Her back muscles moved to flap them even harder. She thought she was ready.

She jumped.

Before she even had time to flap her wings, she hit the ground with a thump.

"Crap…" she muttered, standing up and dusting herself off. She examined her wings. Not broken.

She climbed up and tried again with much the same result. By the time her third attempt came around, she as getting tired of hitting the ground.

"You're doing it wrong."

She nearly fell out of the tree at the sudden voice from behind her. She turned around and saw three new shinigami. When had they showed up?

One was tall and gangly and was dressed all in black. There were poofy feather things on both his shoulders and he wore a heart charm from one ear. His skin was a blue-ish gray and his face looked like a gothic version of the Joker from Batman.

The second resembled a tubby man in a long robe with no arms, but then he swept his wings out and she saw them underneath. His head resembled a hornet's nest and his mouth was small.

The third was Rem. Tall and completely white with skeletal features and yellow eyes, she was the only female, although how she knew this was a mystery since as far as she could tell there were no differentiating characteristics between male and female shinigami.

"Rem!" she cried out, smiling at the sight of her old "friend". She hadn't seen a shinigami since she was, like, five! Or was it six? She didn't remember, exactly.

"You're doing it wrong. You're supposed to flap your wings _before_ you jump, not after. It gives you lift, see?" said the one all in black and he spread his black feathered wings and pumped them once, let himself fall and hovered a few inches off the ground below her, although his head came up to hers. He was very tall. His wings hardly moved at all.

She looked to Rem for confirmation and she gave a barely perceptible nod of her head.

Freshly determined (and very dirty by now) she test flapped her wings once, pumped them extra good, gave a little hop and fell off the tree, but instead of waiting, she began flapping her wings immediately. To her surprise, she did it. She was flying.

She was flying.

She gave a joyful cheer and grinned. "YES!!"

The shinigami all smiled at her except for the strange looking one with the tiny mouth.

She found that she didn't have to flap her wings much at all to stay airborne and it took almost no energy out of her. Even though she was only hovering, this felt wonderful.

She decided to test it out once more and attempted to go higher. She found that by pumping her wings as hard as she could, she rose considerably into the air. Around her, the other shinigami all followed suit and she noticed their wings were all different.

Rem had bat-like white wings with box-shaped skin in between, the strange looking Shinigami had wings that looked like bunched up paper towels and tendons and the one in black had wings lie hers, just slightly less feathered. She asked him about it.

"What a silly question. Isn't it obvious? You're still a child," he pointed out.

She stopped rising. By now, her house looked like a speck. It was very windy up in the sky.

"Thanks for teaching me," she said.

"No problem."

"Um… not that I'm not glad to see you all, but why are you here?" she asked finally.

The wind whipped her hair into her face and she accidentally swallowed a piece of it. She gagged and pulled it out of her face and tucked it into the back of her shirt.

"It is time for you to come to the shinigami realm. The overlord sent all three of us under the assumption that you would not be able to fly, but that isn't the case anymore. Tell your uncle where you're going and that you will be safe and we shall go," instructed Rem.

She nodded and steeled herself for what she was going to try next. If she truly was half shinigami, a fall this high might not kill her. Nay, probably wouldn't', but it would be scary.

She swept her wings back and let herself fall in a steep dive. She caught the surprised looks on all their faces as she plummeted towards the ground and then the thought of what Frank would go through if he saw her falling through the sky made her stop and think. He might have a heart attack or something.

She flared her wings out again and her decent stopped so suddenly that she was jolted. She let herself float down more and finally landed next to the tree she had taken off from.

She climbed down, scraping herself in the process and ran into the house to tell Frank where she was going. On the way, she left her journal and grabbed a hair tie.

She had a feeling she might need one.

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I am really having fun with this.


	6. shinigami realm

Hey, two chapters in one day, aren't you all lucky? Please review!

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Frank was worried about the news, but then, most guardians would be worried if their "children" just told them they were going to visit the Death Realm.

"You be careful, and take this with you. I know it might not help, but keep it hidden in case you do, okay?" he said before she went off. He held out a small, simply knife to her, in the form of a dagger. It wasn't more than four inches long and it would easily fit on her belt loop. Her belt was one of the ones with the silver studs on it She clipped it on, gave Frank a hug and told him she'd be back.

She stepped outside and took in her surroundings before she remembered one more thing and dashed back inside for a small bag of the sort one carried around their chest. She threw a few items inside of it for the trip and hurried back out.

Rem and the two new shinigami stood there waiting for her.

"I'm Gray, by the way," she said, by way of introduction. They had kind of gotten the jump on her before.

"Ryuk," said the one in black.

"Shidoh," said the strange looking one. She smiled and spread her wings once more, looking skyward.

"So…. Which way is it?" she asked.

Ryuk gave a rusty sort of chuckle and spread his wings as well. As he did, one of them fell out and hit the pavement driveway.

"Follow us. You'll have to hold onto someone's hand on the way in though. Even part humans aren't allowed," he said.

Instinctively, she reached for Rem's hand. Rem took hold of it. It wasn't cold, but it wasn't warm, either; it was dry and hard, like bone, yet it was oddly flexible. Strange.

They took off at the same time, coincidentally, and after a moment, they discovered that it was very difficult to fly side by side. Their wings kept getting entangled.

They separated for the moment on the agreement that she would grab her hand just before they reached the space between the worlds.

They flew up higher than they had gone before to the point where she was finding it hard to breathe. She noticed that Rem's sides weren't moving. She wondered if shinigami needed to breathe.

She began taking slower, steadier breaths and found she didn't need to breathe half as much if she let her wings do the breathing for her. Every time she flapped them, they put pressure on her lungs, forcing them to withdraw oxygen, and she needed to breathe less.

They were so high now that the world below looked like a model. Cars were invisibly and buildings were dots. The air here was thin and the wind was freezing her to the bone.

"Once we get there, there will probably be something to warm you, it isn't much further," said Rem over the wind.

Up ahead of them, the sky appeared as pearly white and pristine as it was on the ground but Rem suddenly grabbed her hand and veered sideways, jerking her by the wrist and forcing her to follow. They all disappeared into a pocket of blinding white light and she couldn't see anything.

She wasn't cold anymore. She wasn't warm or dry or happy or sad, she simply… was. This space was… weird. All white and she couldn't see anything except herself.

Rem let go of her hand and she could felt herself again. She looked around. She was hovering in a long, shaft-like tunnel. Above her was a bleak and dreary sky, below her, the shimmery white portal leading back home.

Rem, Ryuk and Shidoh were already far above her. Rem was looking down, waiting for her. She nodded and flew upwards like a rocket.

The land she touched back down on could not have been more alien if she had stepped on mars. It was a seemingly never ending staircase, carved out of miles high stone and surrounded on all sides by blank, open space. There was nothing to hang onto. She thought she'd refer flying to walking, so she did, hovering in step beside Rem as she walked.

"What's in the bag?" asked Ryuk, falling in place beside her, also hovering.

"Food. Stuff. Paper to draw on in case I get bored," she replied nonchalantly.

To prove her point, she took her bag off her shoulder and unzipped it, revealing some of its contents. Among them was a drawing pad, a few pens, a few apples, a banana, a sticky sweet honey treat in a baggy that Frank liked to snack on from time to time and assorted packs of crackers. She had no idea how time went in the realm of death, so she had brought extra of anything she could fit.

"Apples!" exclaimed Ryuk greedily.

"I thought shinigami didn't eat?" she asked Rem curiously.

"We don't need to, no. We are able to. Ryuk has a fondness for human apples," she said. There was a hint of laughter on this last statement, as if she found Ryuk's apple addiction funny.

She reached into her bag and tossed one of the apples to the death god and he snatched it from the air and took a big bite from it.

"Mm… juicy. Love the apples," he mumbled between bites. In three bites, he had devoured the entire thing.

She pulled out one for herself, zipped the bag up and put it back on her shoulder.

They came to the top of the cliff where the first stair was and Gray's jaw dropped. She had been expecting a bit more than this, she admitted to herself, but the death realm was a desolate wasteland.

There were flatlands as gray as the sky and littered with bones both enormous and tiny. Hundreds of shinigami sat or stood or lay around doing nothing or playing games or writing in their death notes or else gazing into pools as a group. They all looked so… bizarre. As the group of four made their way off to the side a bit more, she thought they even passed one with more eyes than arms.

At one point she tripped over something lying in the dirt and fell hard, biting her tongue in the process. She looked back and saw that she had tripped over a staff with a large, hooked blade on the end. It belonged to the shinigami with large lips and large, comical teeth. He had a blinded mask over his eyes and nose, so only red slits showed of his eyes. He lifted his scythe up off the ground and apologized.

"Sorry about that. I just put it down for a second," he said.

"Um… no problem," she said, unsure of whether or not everyone in this realm was safe to talk to. Some of the shinigami looked quite evil. There was one nearby who had an animal skull with fangs for a head.

"Guuku, where's the old man at?" called Ryuk by way of greeting.

"Hey, wait a second. That's the girl?" asked the one whose bone scythe she had tripped over.

"Yeah, this is her," replied Ryuk.

She didn't see the point of relaying her name. Every shinigami could already tell what it was.

"What's your name?" asked the one with the bone mask on. His fanged teeth clacked together as he talked.

She wasn't sure if she could be killed with a death note, but she decided to tempt fate and give her name out anyway.

"Gray McKinnen," she replied quietly.

"I think the shinigami king is in his usual spot today. Least that's what Nu said when I asked her earlier. Hey, kid," said the one Ryuk had called Guuku. She turned towards the funny-looking shinigami with the bone scythe.

"Don't mouth off to the shinigami king. He doesn't like that much," he suggested.

She frowned slightly. Was the shinigami king someone more powerful than even Rem?

"Why?" she asked.

The others all laughed except Rem and at that moment, another shinigami walked over. He looked scary. He had a split open head and large, sharp fangs.

"What's so funny?" he asked grumpily.

"The half human here asked why she shouldn't mouth off to the old man," said the one called Guuku, and they all laughed again.

"Hey! I didn't come here to be laughed at!" said Gray, feeling her temper flaring. Her mood swings had gotten a lot worse lately. She did not menstruate like most human females her age; doctors had confirmed absence of any sort of womb, so she could not anyway. She was more shinigami than she thought.

Nonetheless her temper was severely out of wack lately.

They all stopped laughing.

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Ryuk got the feeling she wasn't one to anger. He knew as much from watching her as a kid because it had been his job, but as she had grown, they had watched her less and less.

She said, "hey! I didn't come here to be yelled at!"

She flared her wings out menacingly, bared her fanged teeth and clenched her fists. Despite her small size, she looked intimidating even to him, who wasn't afraid of much of anything. Her eyes glowed a fierce angry red.

"Humans are so strange," muttered Shidoh.

"Forget it, guys. See you later," said Rem and she put a hand on Gray's shoulder and steered her away.

Ryuk wasn't obligated to follow so he simply chose a spot far enough removed from the others and sat, and left himself to his thoughts.

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REVIEW!


	7. apple for the king

Hey, this chapter took a of thought, but here it is, and I was really expecting more reviews. I took a lot more interest in the death notes and the shinigami than Light or L or Matsuda or the rest, although Misa is pretty annoying.

Anyway, I hope you like this one. This is AU, btw, set before the whole thing with light and L and stuff.

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She was led away by Rem. Shidoh decided to lag behind and eventually distracted himself with a couple of shinigami who resembled lizards somehow.

"So… what does the shinigami king look like? And why does everyone keep calling him 'old man'?" asked Gray as they walked.

Rem answered right away, not because she was devoted to Gray but because she thought it best if the girl didn't ask questions she didn't need answering in front of the overlord.

"Because he is the oldest of us all, possibly immortal. It's just something some call him because they're too lazy to keep saying "shinigami king" all the time."

They kept walking and out the corner of the eye that wasn't uncovered, she saw the girl take off her bag and pull out something in a sticky wrapper. She unwrapped it and threw her trash in another pocket of the bag.

She munched on the sticky whatever-it-was as they walked further. Thankfully, she didn't trip over anything else.

They passed enormous skeletons of things that had never existed in the human world, ribcages that had been purposefully built to resemble long hallways, human skeletons and animal skulls. Everywhere they went were either dead mountains, flat plains and gray. Everything there was gray. She really was aptly named, thought Rem.

By sight, she most resembled Ryuk and whoever had the orange eyes, which was odd, but personality wise, she resembled every one who had been summoned by the Overlord that day nearly 18 years ago.

She was naturally inquisitive, much like Zellogi and from what she herself had seen looking down on her, loved wet weather, much like Midora. She could be lazy like Guuku or violent like Kinddara. She was smart like herself (Rem) and could be sly like Ryuk. No one who had participated at the Overlord's orders had the tendency to feign stupidity to hide intelligence, though. That was hers alone.

They were approaching a high cliff with chains stuck in the ground now. They were coming very close. Dead trees and burned grass lay nearby. The trees had been dead for some time. The grass, having never been green, was only burned recently.

On the way, they passed Armonia "Justin" Beyondormason. Gray stared. It was understandable. The shinigami was covered in jewels and gems of everything imaginable yet resembled a brightly colored skeleton.

"Grateful Dead meets Cleopatra, eat your heart out," Gray muttered, eyes wide and curious.

To their surprise, Armonia threw his head back and laughed.

His eyes, which were large, bright white gemstones (how he saw anything was Rem's guess) seemed to twinkle and he held out one bony, bejeweled hand.

"Armonia," he introduced himself.

"Gray," she said, shaking his hand only briefly.

"So you're on your way to have a word with Gramps, eh? Careful. He doesn't trick easy," warned Armonia.

Gray, ever the inquisitive one, leaned forward a little, getting a closer look at the jewel skeleton shinigami. Armonia, surprisingly, let her.

"Are they attached to your skin or something?" she asked finally. She was referring to the many stones.

Armonia chuckled again and plucked one off. Something that was not quite blood trickled, but nothing else happened what so ever.

"Where do you think most of the stones in shinigami jewelry comes from? I'm a mine for them. Want one?" he asked.

Gray made a face, somewhere between amused and disgusted and raised an eyebrow.

"Uh…. No thanks. Shouldn't we be going?"

Armonia chuckled again and stuck the small red stone back where he had pulled it from and the "bleeding" stopped. Why he bled at all was a mystery to Rem, as he was basically a skeleton. Not even the shinigami knew everything about the shinigami.

"You should have accepted. Justin doesn't usually give things away like that," said Rem. Gray didn't reply.

She led Gray away from Armonia and took the turn behind the end of the cliff and chains towards a large platform in the dirt made of stone and rock. Suspended and chained many feet in the air was the Shinigami King himself. Four arms ending in vicious claws, a skull mask and various skull-like spines jutting from all sides, it was almost difficult to tell just how big the King of Death really was, but it was pretty big.

"Why is he all chained up?" whispered Gray very quietly out of the corner of her mouth.

"No one knows," Rem whispered back.

"Welcome, young one. Gray McKinnen," said the Shinigami King. He was speaking in the Shinigami tongue, what Frank had interpreted as snarling and growling but was actually closer to a mix of Finnish and Gaelic. It was a language that Gray, for some reason, had known since the day she was born.

Gray wasn't sure if she should say anything or not so she just nodded and shouldered her bag better. Why was it suddenly cold? It had been humid before. She put her wings out and attempted to get warmer by folding herself in a feathery hug.

If the Shinigami overlord thought anything odd of it, he didn't say.

"Um… hi," she managed to say.

"Do you know why you were created?" asked the Shinigami King.

This question seemed to take her buy surprise. She made a sarcastic, heavy face and raised an eyebrow, gazing up at the Overlord.

"Uh…. Cause my mom was kidnapped and raped? Frank told me that," she replied.

To everyone's surprise, the Shinigami king gave a raspy chuckle. Would they run into no one who disliked Gray?? But this was good, if she could help them after all.

"Well, she was kidnapped, in a sense of speaking. Raped? That is a bit harsh. You humans have such strange terms for such common things. But no. You were not created out of whim. I thought it was a possible course of action," the Overlord responded.

"Um. I think I missed something. You're saying _you_ created me? Like the proverbial Christian god," said Gray cynically. She was smarter than she acted.

"_I_ did nothing except disturb molecules and beings. No, I did not create you alone. You were created using your mother's body _by _six other shinigami. Rem, beside you," he said, pointing at Rem with one of his four three fingered hands, "Ryuk, Zellogi, Midora, Kinddara and Justin."

"You haven't met everyone yet," added Rem to her.

"I guessed. So… what, I have a mother and seven fathers?" said Gray skeptically. She certainly _looked_ confused, but then, so would anybody.

"I am a female shinigami," said Rem, not really offended but just wanting to get it out in the open.

"You're smarter than this, Gray McKinnen. I know it. No, you have four fathers and three mothers, technically. It's of no importance, since a human raised you. The reason you are here now is because we need your help," said the Shinigami king.

"My help with what?" she asked, this time being quite serious. It appeared she had dropped the "play obnoxious young human" act. She was now revealing her more intelligent half.

"The Black Tower and the dragon that guards it," said the Shinigami overlord.

There was a brief silence.

"Black Tower and a dragon? That sounds,… familiar…," she muttered more to herself than anything. She looked around, craning her neck. The tower in question lay over the horizon like a giant bat looming over its prey. They couldn't see the dragon from where they were, but its flame reached far.

"The dragon is the main obstacle. It cannot die and its fire can kill a shinigami Even I cannot approach it. This is why we created you using the mother that carried you," he explained.

"Lauren McKinnen," said Gray.

"Correct."

There was another silence. Gray appeared to be doing some serious thinking.

"If you can't get past the dragon, what made you think a part human part shinigami could? Won't I be killed too? You can't just use me as a test to answer that one. You wouldn't want to waste that much time if this thing is threatening the shinigami realm, would you?" she asked finally.

Even Rem was impressed. It seemed she had inherited Armonia's intelligence if not his selfishness.

Apparently, the shinigami overlord knew this as well.

"You are quite right, young one. Actually, I have reason to believe that the dragon is chained up. You never see it flying. We're like flies to it. We can't get near enough to do anything to it or even get past it. It sees on all sides, see," explained the King.

"Whenever a shinigami gets close enough to get past, it breathes fire and poof! All done!" said a voice from behind them

Gray looked around and saw no one. Just rocks and dead trees and chains and burned grass.

"Hnn?" she mumbled, puzzled.

Rem of course knew who had spoken. Nu was a very rare sort of shinigami. She resembled nothing more than a large boulder stuck in the ground. At the moment she was rendered invisible because her arms were at her sides and all her eyes were closed.

"Hmm," said Gray, clearly figuring she had been hearing things.

"Got any apples in that bag? I hear they're quite tasty," said the voice again, and this time Gray saw what she thought was a rock, talk.

"Whaaa?" she said, head cocked to the side.

She cautiously approached the "rock" and fell back when Nu opened all of her eyes at once. She was covered in them, from head to… well, whatever passed for her feet. The only exception was her arms and mouth.

"Yah!" gasped Gray as she fell. She must have hit her hand on something sharp, perhaps a bone fragment because when she lifted her hand, there was a deep, ugly dark slice in the palm. It didn't bleed as Rem expected, though. The blood was maroon and already congealed.

She wrapped it in her shirt nonetheless, (which was still soaked from condensation from flying) and wiped the gooey blood off.

Nu chuckled and again asked for an apple.

"Ever since Ryuk discovered apples on his last forage into the human world, we've all become quite fond of them. Any fruit that grows here is rotten and tastes like sand," said the shinigami king.

Gray unfolded her wings from around her body and Rem noticed her normally gray-white skin had an odd, blue tint to it. She was cold and was choosing not to show it. It was very cold around the overlord.

She rummaged in her bag and brought out an apple and offered it to Nu, who grabbed it and ate it in one bite, licking her lips in joy.

"Mmm, juicy," she said, licking her fingers as best she could.

"She then offered one to the shinigami king himself but he couldn't reach it with his shortened arms. Rem handed it to him, since Gray wouldn't dare and the king ate it as fast as Nu had eaten hers.

"Thank you. Where was I? Oh, yeah. The dragon…

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Cliffie!! Dun dun DUUN!!


	8. Meet the parents

Hey, I'm altering the shinigami king's personality a bit, and after watching both parts to the death note live action movie, I now have a greater sympathy for Rem and Gelus (who I'm reviving for filler purposes cause he's so pathetically cute) They might become slightly more important characters, too.

That's all I had to say. Please keep reading!!

Note also: I'm introducing ranks here, cause I think I wanna follow the manga more closely than the videos. In actuality, I'm blending all three but just to note: the higher the ranking number (i.e. 13 as opposed to 2) the lower ranking and less powerful the shinigami.

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"The dragon sees on all sides at all times and can not only see your name and lifespan but will learn from your actions. Once you get past that dragon, I will send someone along to explain what you are to do next. Is this clear?" asked the Shinigami King. Both skulls glared red daggers at the girl and for a moment, Rem was sure she would "freak out" as the humans said.

Gray put her bag back on her back and spread her wings again, encasing herself in them like a giant bat to stay warm. Her lips were blue and fast approaching purple now.

"Sure. Can you give me some time to plan a strategy out first?" she asked.

The shinigami king appeared to think for a moment.

"You have a week. Send Justin to me when you're ready and he'll show you which way to go. You're excused. Feel free to wander, although you won't find much…." Said the king, and Rem decided Gray had stayed long enough.

She put a hand on her shoulder and steered her back the way they came.

"Is he always that straightforward?" she asked as they walked. Rem decided to fly instead and flew alongside the half-breed girl.

"Not usually. This dragon has lived in the shinigami realm for many, many years but this is the first time it's ever been a threat. Who ever built that tower now lives in it and controls the dragon. I guess our overlord thinks you have what it takes," she replied offhandedly.

They made it back to where Guuku and Deridovely were gambling (rather badly) and found Zellogi, Midora, Gelus and, surprisingly, Daril Ghiroza. She was ranked second only to Armonia "Justin", who was ranked somewhere between the shinigami king himself and Nu.

"It seems rather a few of us want to meet the one who was Born," said Rem conversationally.

Midora resembled an enormous salamander with a bulbous head and polka dots down her back and tail. She wore no clothes or adornments and was taller than Gray but not Rem herself.

Zellogi was human-like in stature but his face was burned-looking and maroon-ish and he wore a number of furry objects, which were his favorite things, including a lot of accessories. A hook replaced his left hand.

Daril was the only one who seemed to intimidate the girl, noticed Rem. She resembled a tall, bony human and had a skull for a face. She wore a very antiquated looking head piece with beads dangling from it and a black shawl over her shoulders that perfectly matched her hair, or what there was of it.

The last one was shy and Gray almost didn't notice him, but then, the little Gelus didn't normally associate himself with the other death gods. He was a strange one. Kind-hearted and sympathetic, which was most unlike a shinigami.

He was around four feet tall and clumsy looking. He appeared to have been stitched together using various pieces of fabric and despite only having one eye, he had two eye sockets. His fingers were tiny and you almost couldn't see them at the ends of his arms.

Gray later said he looked a bit like a ragdoll. Rem supposed this was another human term for "cute".

"Hi," she said nervously to them all. She gave a tentative wave and Rem noticed her claws. They were white with blue tints.

She unfolded her wings from around herself and sucked them back into her shoulders. Now she appeared to be a gray skinned human girl with horns, shinigami eyes colored blue, claws and fangs.

"So this is the human who has come to the shinigami world?" Said Daril. She spoke with a slight western accent, very reminiscent of humans who came from the Midwest of the place they called the United States. She stared intently at Gray and Gray, seeming to get used to see a skull speak, stared right back, apparently as fascinated by the shinigami as they were by her.

"Technically, I'm only part human. If I were human, I wouldn't be up here," said Gray speculatively. Was she not afraid? Daril was a very high ranked shinigami. Perhaps she simply wasn't aware. Rank wasn't a common tact to bully others in the shinigami realm. It wasn't a deciding factor.

"So the human has a smart mouth, too, eh? We might have to—"

"-That is enough, Daril. She just arrived and isn't used to being here yet. The Overlord gave her a week to find a way to get past the dragon. Give her room," said Rem coldly.

"She's spending a week here? He's allowing it? She's alive! She has human inside of her," said Daril, not quite whining but definitely peeved. She cared nothing for humans or the human world.

Gelus hadn't said a word yet. He just listened and watched, as he usually did. (A/N: Gelus hasn't started falling for Misa in this one).

"Do you have the shinigami eyes?"

The question came out of nowhere.

Gray reached a claw tip carefully into her eyeball and picked something out, something clear and slightly tinted. The result was she appeared to have one orange, shinigami eye and one blue human eye, although larger than average.

"They're contact lenses to make my eyes appear normal down in the human world. I can take them out if you want," she said, glaring purposefully at Daril. She took the other one out and tossed them into her bag without any sort of case. It seemed she didn't care for them.

At that moment, Justin (Armonia) and Kinddara walked over. It was rare for Justin to leave his throne, where he spent nearly all of his time. Gray waved to Justin because she had already seen him but she saw Kinddara and her hand faltered. Her smile vanished and her eyes went wide with curiosity.

Kinddara liked intimidating people and looked very fierce. She had a huge fissure down the middle of her otherwise humanoid head and fangs without lips.

"Holy…. Crap…" she muttered, staring curiously. She didn't seem to be afraid, rather awed.

"I thought we ought to see the part human we helped to create, in a group. Make it a nice family gathering, eh?" Said Justin sardonically, grinning. Gray seemed confused. He had seemed nice before, why was he being creepy now?

"Where's Ryuk? Wasn't he there with us?" asked Midora. She had a deep, froggy voice.

"Right here," said Ryuk, flying down to land in the middle of them all. Now everyone who had helped create the girl was here, thought Rem. The only extras were Gelus, Deridovely and Guuku. Being lower level shinigami, they had not been required.

"So… you guys helped create me, huh?" said Gray, making conversation.

"Yeah. I guess you could say that, although all we really did was hold hands. The old man did everything, don't ask," said Ryuk nonchalantly, grinning evilly.

"Fine by me. I wasn't going to," she said. She sat down on the ground and began rummaging through her bag. Eventually she found what she was looking for and pulled out a flat piece of machinery.

"Laptop. I get bored easy, so I thought I'd bring it," she said in response to their puzzled looks.

She opened it and set it on her crossed legs. The screen lit up and began pouring out random data. Rem had seen one before, while watching humans to kill, but a majority of the ones who cared nothing for watching before killing were awed by it. These included Kinddara and Justin.

Kinddara kneeled down just behind the girl and watched her work. Her desktop showed a picture of a violent scene of death, with blood splattered on the floor and a mass of tangled limbs in the middle. She stood over it all looking perfectly shinigami.

"Is this real?" she asked, pointing to it. She was kneeling beside Kinddara.

"No. It's just a couple friends of mine and a load of fake blood. It was for Halloween," she said, not paying attention. She was sifting through Internet files and folders, her large, orange eyes reflecting the light of the screen.

Eventually, she finished what she was looking for and closed it shut again with a quiet little _snick_. She tucked it back into her bag and took out a banana. She peeled it and took a bite. It seemed she needed to eat at least once in awhile.

She finished it and tossed the peel inside her bag and reshouldered it.

"Meh. She's boring. I'll be stacking bones," said Daril, and she turned and loped off.

"Nice attitude she's got. Um… it is a she, right?" said Gray, suddenly unsure. She seemed to be making some sort of joke.

"Yeah, it isn't as easy to tell with us shinigami, is it? Listen to our voices and figure it out, kid," said Ryuk.

"I know Rem's a girl. Midora, that name just sounds feminine. You're a girl, right?" she said, thinking out loud.

"Smart kid," said Midora, nodding.

While they all told her if they were male or female, just to clear it all up, Rem noticed Gelus sitting in the dirt a little to the side, scribbling in his death note. Rem thought it odd. He liked humans, generally and hated writing. She stood up and peered over his shoulder.

He was writing the names of humans, as all death gods were wont to do. It was odd, though. He was doing it openly, around others. He wasn't afraid of being called a workaholic.

"Why don't you want to talk to Gray? The others seem to like her well enough," she asked.

Gelus was having trouble holding the pen the right way. With his ill-formed fingers, he had to grip the pen in his fist.

"Stupid pen… oh, hi. I don't know. She seems alright," he said distractedly.

Rem shrugged and thought he would come around.

She turned back to the others and found that Zellogi was attempting to teach her how to play cards. Zellogi was the last shinigami you wanted to teach you how to gamble, she thought. He was notoriously bad.

"Would you like to be alone?" she asked her. Gray, who was obviously not interested in the cards, got to her feet and stretched.

"No, that's okay. I think I'm gonna wander for a bit, get to know this place. I won't go anywhere near the dragon until I have to, don't worry," she said, and she gave Rem her bag and flew off.

Rem stood holding the bag, a little surprised that she had been entrusted with it for the time being but nonetheless calm.

"Nice kid," said Deridovely after awhile.

"Mmm. Bad card player though," said Zellogi.

Ryuk giggled and reached for the bag, probably to look for more apples, but Rem held it out of his reach.

"There are no apples left. She gave the last to Nu and the shinigami king," said Rem, so he wouldn't even bother.

"She gave an apple to the old man? She must really want to get on his good side," said Justin.

Rem said nothing. She just watched the girl wander off on foot, her orange hair blowing in the breeze.

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PLEASE REVIEW!!


	9. A new friend

I can't believe I already have 9 chapters on this thing. Holy fucking shit. See, THIS is why this thing is rated M I swear too much :P lol must be hereditary hahaa. Anyway here it is, chapter 9.

A note from me is this: It is stated as such that "The Shinigami have a language; each Shinigami has his or her own written language, with some opting for letters and some opting for pictures. Takeshi Obata, arist of the series, said that he assumes that all Shinigami can understand the languages of one another" I find this fascinating and I think I'm gonna incorporate it somehow, but It may or may not happen. Also,

"Shinigami may be male or female. Shinigami cannot and are not permitted to have sexual relations with humans; they cannot have sexual intercourse with each other, nor can they reproduce. In addition, humans cannot easily tell which Shinigami are male and which Shinigami are female. _Death Note: How to Read 13_ adds that Shinigami may have emotions "relating to the opposite sex." For instance Ryuk feels shy and embarrassed when Misa hugs him. "

I thought the words "cannot and are not permitted to" interesting. It doesn't say "are not physically able to" does it? I mean, technically, there are undead since they have no natural lifespan of their own and must rely on humans to stay alive, which makes it logical that if they do have any "bits" they don't work, but still. What ELSE makes the difference between male and female? Even if it's just a voice, the different levels of estrogen and testosterone would need to be present, which makes it logical that they must have some sort of organs down there, but anyway, I digress. I thought I'd exploit this little loophole somehow, someway later on in the story.

Anyway, not until later. On with the story!

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Gray felt the eyes of everyone on her back and smiled a little. Inside she was dancing wit joy. Finally, she was in the shinigami realm! Finally, she was getting some answers!

Unfortunately, she had more questions, and she had a feeling it would be no easy task to get them answered.

She kicked at the dirt beneath her feet once she was an adequate distance away from the others and bent down to poke at it. It was fine grained and very powdery and even here there were bone fragments littering the ground. Above her, storm clouds started to gather. Even in the realm of death, there was weather. She found that very interesting.

Unfortunately, her clothes were still damp from her flight into the nether regions of the human sky and if it was going to rain, she was going to get even wetter. She was already chilled to the bone. Maybe she should have brought change of clothes? With all the other things she had brought, she would not have had room in her bag.

She picked up what looked like a very small, sharp tooth and dusted the sand away from it. It looked like a small fang from a cat or a dog. She liked collecting teeth. She had all her baby teeth in a little pouch back home. Her baby teeth were pointed like fangs.

She pocketed it in her skirt and glanced up in time for the first rain drop to hit her in the face.

She shivered violently and again hugged herself with her wings. The fluffed up feathers helped keep her warm and once it began to rain, the water would run right off.

She looked around herself once again and noticed she was in a very sandy, desert-like part of the shinigami realm. The shinigami king had been right; it really was all the same no matter where you went.

She sat down in the dirt in the shadow of a small cavern made of bones and shivered again, her feathers fluffing out even ore as she did so. How was she going to get past an all-seeing dragon whose fire could kill on contact? She was only 17! How was she supposed to get it done any better than someone here?

"Thinking?" said a voice from behind her.

She spun around and saw the small, stitched together shinigami Rem had introduced as Gelus. Up this close, he was positively cute, despite the one eye. Clumsily put together, just a little pathetic and awkward. She felt right away that he could be trusted.

"Oh, hi. Gelus, right?" she said.

Gelus nodded and took out his death note. There was a strange sort of picture writing on the front and Gray peered closer at it, trying to make out what it said.

"It's my name," he said, without her asking. He looked frustrated about something. His voice was surprisingly soft spoken for a shinigami and for some reason, she felt a gentle sort of aura around him.

She crawled on her hands and knees to sit beside him and see what he was frustrating him. He was having trouble gripping the pen he held. His fingers were so small and very ill formed for holding the pen he had.

She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out the pen she had been using to write in her journal earlier. It was smaller, made for human hands and not as clumsy as the pens or pencils shinigami used.

"Try this," she said, offering it to him.

Gelus seemed to study her for a moment and then dropped his pen and took hers. To his surprise, it was small enough so that he could hold it normally instead of in a fist like usual. It was much easier to write like this!

"Hey, thanks. It's a lot easier to hold," he said, finishing the name of a human with a flourish. It wrote smoothly in black ink.

"Don't mention it," she said distractedly, peering off into the distance. It had started to rain hard outside, and inside the cave of bones, only a few drips got through. She was still cold.

"Where do shinigami get all their clothes from? She asked finally.

Gelus shrugged his tiny shoulders in a "who knows" gesture.

She shivered again and watched the rain.

"Been thinking about how to get past that dragon?" he asked suddenly.

"Yeah. I honestly don't know why he thinks I should be able to succeed when others have failed," she said. She knew Gelus would assume her use of the word "he" would mean the shinigami king.

Gelus was silent for a moment.

"I'm sure there's a way, somehow. I wasn't allowed to keep tabs on you before, so I don't know. I guess he wants you to figure it out," he said finally.

Gray sighed. She got the impression that Gelus was one of the less intelligent shinigami, if the most gentle-hearted.

"What's worse is I only have a week to figure it out," she complained, drawing her knees to her chest and resting her arms on them.

"Time flows differently here. A week in the human world is about a month here," said Gelus quietly. He had stopped writing and his notebook lay at his side. Now he sat and watched the rain as well.

"Are you cold?" he asked her.

She shivered again and nodded.

She heard the little Gelus scramble away and looked over her shoulder in time to see him shambling back dragging what looked like a large black rag through the dirt. He handed it to her.

She stood up, towering at least a foot and a half over the smaller shinigami and shook the dirt out of the thing he had been carrying, which turned out to be a long black trench coat, shredded and ragged. But the point was, it had long sleeves and holes cut in for wings.

"Hey, thanks," she said, slightly impressed. She pulled it on and found it was a lot too big for her. It dragged on the ground behind her and the sleeves went way past her fingertips.

But she was finally warm!

She snuggled deep into it and smiled gratefully. Gelus smiled back as best as he could with his lopsided, ill-stitched face, glad he had been able to help. It could get quite cold sometimes.

Outside, the rain stopped, leaving the sandy ground nothing but mud. She didn't care to walk through that, so she brought out her wings and, stepping outside, began to hover, flapping only to remain airborne. Gelus followed her. The wings that sprouted from his back were significantly smaller than her own, but just as stitched as the rest of him was. They were leathery, blue and batlike. He hovered like her.

"Want a tour?" he asked. He had his death note tucked under one arm and handed her pen back to her. She shook her head and put it back into his hand.

"Keep it, I have lots more with me," she said. Gelus looked surprised. He wasn't used to receiving gifts, nor was he used to having friends in the shinigami realm. They teased him for not acting like a proper death god.

"Sure. Does the whole place look like this?" she asked. Gelus nodded.

"Follow me," said the little rag-doll shinigami and he flew off into the sky. She followed suit, stirring the mud with the wind from her wings and they flew through the sky like that, she following her newest friend as he showed her around. He showed her the cliffs where nothing-ness existed, where all humans went when they died. To her it appeared to be a blank void of black where the sky and the ground should have been, but she could hear voices unintelligibly.

"Don't go over these cliffs. If you fall in, you join the void and cease to exist," Gelus warned her. She shied away.

He then showed her the different regions of the realm of death. The bowls of plains formed by cragged mountains and the mountains of bones that were main hangouts of the shinigami and the desert regions with the viewing pools where shinigami went when they wanted to kill humans alone. He showed her vast plains of bones, nothing but bones, it was like a bone graveyard.

Next he showed her the path to the newly erected black tower, and with it, the dragon she was to face. He made her hide behind a clump of dead bushes. She felt like she was a kid again, hiding with a friend where she wasn't supposed to be.

The dragon was ENORMOUS. Even from this distance, she could clearly see it had bulging yellow eyes and a long, pointed snout. It was enormous.

"Come on, that thing always made me nervous," said Gelus and he led her away again.

He was flying back towards the place where the others had congregated before and retracted his wings before he even touched the ground, floating gently to the earth. She tried the same thing and fell heavily, landing with a thud that knocked the wind out of her.

Unfortunately, there were still a few shinigami hanging around, Ryuk, Guuku and Deridovely among them and they all saw it and laughed.

She stood up and brushed herself off, the sleeves of her newest addition flapping as she did and she glowered, feeling her face flame red with what flowing blood she had. Her heart did beat, but nonetheless, she had o pulse. The majority of her blood was already congealed. How she lived was a mystery to science.

"You may have a lot of shinigami in you, but you're still solid no matter how you look at it," said Deridovely, still cackling.

"You mean I probably couldn't go al transparent like you guys can?" she asked.

"Most likely, not," said Ryuk, smiling evilly.

"Fuck," she said dully.

Guuku grinned.

She had met the king of death, had met her contributing parents and even made a new friend.

So passed her first day in the land of the dead.

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please review!


	10. Experiments

Sorry I haven't written anything in forever, I've been buisy with a full time job and stress with friends and tension between the same and planning for this huge convention in May and it's pretty much consumed me until now. I have a little time, so here's chapter 10. Enjoy and please review!

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The next day passed much as the first had. She explored a bit more on her own and began trying to teach Deridovely and Guuku how to play something else besides Pokert and other gambling games. She was having little luck with War, Old Maid or Crazy Eights. The two less intellligent shinigami found little interest in the human games. Daril found them even less amusing. She was still cold towards Gray.

By the third day, Ryuk was sent to find her with a message from the shinigami king, to get a move on with some sort of plan. So far she'd come up with moot.

She'd been scribbling incessantly on what paper she had brought with her, but none of the plans she had so far concocted involved her getting away scot-free. She only had three sheets left. She had to be careful not to waste them.

She hadn't written anything else in the death note given her by the shinigami king, mostly because she wasn't sure about it yet. Justin had written all the rules on the insides of both covers for her to understand, his writing tiny and cramped, but at least in English. What he hadn't writen was whether or not killing humans before their time to die would add years to her own life or not. She knew it would not if she were full human, but she wasn't. Maybe no one knew?

"Hey, Gelus," she said on the fourth day. They were alone in the only part of the shinigami realm that had any water, where only Midora hung out, but she was nowhere to be found at the moment. There was a tiny lake here, surrounded by bones and dust and chunks of concrete that littered the ground like fallen tombstones.

"Mmm?" he mumbled. He was sitting with his short legs splayed in front of him and was staring between his knees, thinking and not talking.

"Something I'm not sure about... could you do me a favor?" she asked.

"Depends on if I'm allowed to or not," he replied, still not looking at her.

She dropped her death note on the ground and said, "OI forfeit ownership of this death note, for the moment."

Not many of her memories left her. She knew what she had planned on asking, anyway, and that was all she focused on. Gelus was staring at her with his one eye, curious.

"What are you doing?" he asked, curious.

"You can see my remaining lifespan?" she asked.

"... Yes. But I can't tell you when it is," he said oddly.

"That's okay. I don't want you to. Memorize it, the number of years I have left," she instructed him. She was going to conduct an experiment. There was a human world viewing pool close by.

"Okay," said Gelus.

She picked up her death note once more and shivered as what few memories she'd lost rushed back. She opened it and crawled to the viewing pool close by, wrote the name of the first person she saw, and waited thr 40 seonds. The person collapsed.

She forfieted the death note again and turned to Gelus.

"Has it changed?" she asked.

Gelus stared, his single eye wide.

"Yeah. By 20 years," he said, awed.

She picked up the death note again and smiled. So being part shinigami meant she could add years to her life like a shinigami but remain as human as possible.

She thanked the little shinigami, bent o ver her notes and began thinking of a new strategy to get past the dragon.

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Gotta go to bed!! R&R!


	11. Love

Hey, you're lucky, this is the secnd chapter in forever. Pretty soon I'll have my own laptop so you'll have more. Please R&R

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By the fifth day, she thought she had an almost workable plan to get past the dragon. She shared it with Rem and Ryuk soon after she had it sketched out. It was her absolute last piece of paper, too, so it was a good thing. Any more and she'd have to move the plans to her laptop, which wasn't doing so well off the charger in another dimension. It worked, but barely. There was no internet and the screen kepty flickering for some reason.

"You found a way to get past the dragon, huh?" asked Ryuk. He hunched down so their faces were on the same level and he peered at the paper she had scribbled on. He squinted.

"How can you read you own handwriting?" he asked skeptically.

Gray smiled. "I'm fluent in Scribble," she replied.

She stood up so Ryuk wouldn't have to hunch down so far.

They were all gathered around the small-ish lake where Midora hung out. It had become a favorite place of Gray's, too. She loved the water. She hadn't yet gathered courage enough to take a swim, though. So far Midora hadn't bothered her. Gray thought it might be because Midora's sheer size didn't frighten her.

"I was thinking... the dragon sees on all sides, right? And its fire kills shinigami. What if I blinded it somehow?" she proposed. She thought it made sense.

"It can still hear and smell. That wouldn't do much. You would still be in danger," Rem pointed out, putting a finger on her drawings. She gave Gray a calm, thoughtful face that made Gray feel like a little kid being lectured. She didn't mind, though, because she liked Rem. She had a way of pointing things out in a cool, collected manner and so far that Gray noticed, never got really angry.

She was also pretty as far as shinigami went and very interesting to look at.

"Okay... so it could still hear and smell me. Maybe someone could draw it away from me? If it's blindfolded, it'll make it cautious, not spontaneous. It probably wouldn't breathe fire," she said, more thinking out loud than anything.

"What makes you say that? If I was blindfolded, I'd lash out at everything," said Ryuk, giggling.

Gray frowned slightly, She liked Ryuk, too, because he was intelligent but silly, a regular joker, the exact opposite of Rem. Sometimes, though, he could be dense. His manner of thinking out loud was a little less intelligent than Rem, too. Rem was a better talker, in other words. Ryuk lived in his own little world of constant games.

"Look, if it's blindfolded, it won't know where anything is anymore. It won't want to lash out at random because it might destroy something it won't want to. Namely the tower?" suggested Gray, smiling crookedly.

"So you're suggesting blindfolding it somehow and having a shinigami draw it towards thew black tower to destroy it?" summed Rem.

"Who would do something as suicidal as that?" asked Ryuk.

That brought Gray back to earth, so to speak, since she was in another dimension.

"And how do you blindfold something that can see on all sides," muttered Gray. Those were the only two flaws in her plan.

While she sat and thought about it, Ryuk was looking through the other pages of her scribbles and drawings and thoughts and ideas, his eyes moving over the pages like water. He was a fast reader.

Rem looked over her shoulder at the drawing she was working on now, the backside of her very last piece. She was just doodling, really, very fast and very rough, writing using her own shorthand, just abbreviations of words she knew the meanings of, like drgn for dragon and dg for death god, aka shinigami. Rem could make no sense of it, she knew, but it made sense to her.

She doodled a very sloppy sketch of the dragon guarding an even sloppier tower and drew two stick figures... ideas were coming to her even as she wrote. She had no blindfold big enough for that dragon, she knew... stab its eyes out? No, that would put those fangs too close to her for comfort...

Then the answer came to her in one glorious fell swoopp. She crumpled the paper up into a ball and bounced it off Ryuk's head to get his attention.

"Mace," she said gleefully, smiling.

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She threw all her papers and ideas onto the ground and lit them on fire with a lighter borrowed from Armonia Justin. He smoked for some reason, and no one had any idea where he got the cigarettes or the lighter from. Or why he felt he needed them, for that matter.

Nonetheless, she had an idea now. She would mace the dragon in the eyes and blind it. Hopefully it would go into a rampage and destroy the black tower. Kill two birds with one stone, as Frank always said. It would also create less work for her.

What was bothering her now that she had this idea was what the shinigami would do to or with her once her usefulness had ended. She wasn't stupid. She knew the shinigami king had deigned her birth necessary for some reason to take n the dragon and whoever controlled it.

What about when both threats were gone? What then? Would they let her go back home and remain living? Or would they consider her an abomination and kill her using a death note? Would death notes even work on her?

She had asked Rem (very politely) to go tell the shinigami king she had a plan but she would need a couple of things.

Once she had grown distant enough in the sky, Ryuk turned to her.

"I think she's grown fond of you to take messages like that," he said, jerking his head back at the growing-smaller Rem.

Gray shrugged. If she was true to her emotions, she loved the female shinigami, more as a parent figure and a friend. She had shown herself to her (Gray) early in her life and had dropped messages every once in awhile. Gray knew she had kept watch on her growing up. Rem was like the mother she had never known, in a strange way.

"I know. I'm fond of her, too. She was sort of like... a human version of a guardian angel when I was growing up. Sending messages every now and again when she felt like it and giving me advice. Not talking down to me like a little kid and saying things like they were. I sort of loved her like a kid would love a mother growing up. Sound wierd?" she said, not paying attention to Ryuk, who was twirling his fingers in the sparse, dead grass.

"Hn? No," he said, shaking his head. He seemed distracted for soem reason.

"What are you thinking about? You seem distracted, Ryuk," she asked, tilting her head subconsciously.

"Hm? Nothing. Rem's been gone for ten minutes now. I wonder what's taking her so long?" he asked, searching the skies.

Aware he was dodging her question, Gray said nothing more about it.

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It might be awhile before I post again, my laptop is having cookie issues. Anyone know how to delete cookies?? Please review and tell me! I have internet explorer 6.0 and a windows XP


	12. Help from below

Hey, next chapter is up, please review

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Ryuk dodged her question on purpose, of course.

In truth, he was thinking about the whole situation. The shinigami king's strange decision, his choice of what he had called "DNA volunteers" and what Gray was meant to do. That and what would become of her once she had done what she was created to do.

He highly doubted she would be killed. Would the King send her back to the human world or force her to stay here?

He was also thinking hard about what had actually occured that day 17 years ago, when he had been asked to join hands with the others. What _had_ gone on then? No one had done a thing except hold hands.

He had come to the conclusion that in a messed up way, he was Gray's father... wait, _one_ of her fathers. There was also Rem, Armonia Justin, Midora, Kindaara and Zellogi. They were all shinigami and with the exception of Rem, not a one of them had any empathy for humans.

He thought he might be getting it, though. Not one person here except Daril could find anything bad to say about Gray McKinnen and she was slowly gaining a reputation for being the most complicated "shinigami" in the shinigami world, displaying more personality traits than anyone else. She weas kind hearted, violent, hateful, caring, funny, serious and a load of others he didn't feel like noticing at the moment.

In other words, if the shinigami king felt she had to die when her usefulness had ended, he got the feeling at least one shinigami would be extremely opposed. He was wondering if he would want to oppose as well.

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Rem returned and told Gray of the shinigami king's wishes.

"He says anything you can find to use in this realm is yours for using. Do you know how to make mace?" she asked, tilting her head slightly. Her white and blue tinted hair tilted with her, brushing against the side of her face.

Gray looked up at Rem and smiled slightly.

"Yeah, sure. There's a lot of recipes online. You still have my bag?" she asked.

Rem reached behind her and extricated the bag from the bone-like structures on her back. She had felt silly wearing the bag as it was intended to be worn but it was the only way to keep snoopers out of it.

She handed it to her and Gray reached in and took out her laptop again.

"I'm gonna use the last juice in the battery to get a recipe offline and then this thing will die. I won't be able to turn it on any more," she said as a warning.

Rem watched with Ryuk, who seemed distant for some reason, as Gray switched the laptop on and it beeped a couple times. She was starting it up.

She typed furiously for a few seconds and waited, moving her finger around on the smooth, black surface of the computer. Rem supposed it was some sort of mouse system, but she didn't know a lot about computers.

"Come on... don't crap out on me now..." Gray muttered, biting her lower lip with her sharp teeth. She accidentally cut herself and the same maroon, goopy, half dried blood seeped out. It wasn't really blood at all.

She smiled and tapped once on the mouse and furiously dug into her bag. She withdrew her death note and a pen.

"I know it'll be strike one out of four until this thing is useless for killing, but I'm out of paper and this needs to be copied", she said and she began writing just as fast as she typed.

The laptop screen went black.

"Shit!" Gray cursed.

She tapped the keyboard a few times, but when the screen remained resolutely black, she groaned.

"Damn," she said, closing the thing and stuffing it back into her bag.

She sighed, blowing her hair away from her face and slumped, disappointed.

Almost immediately, she snatched the piece of paper she had been writing on out of her death note and, folding it, began to write on the back of it.

Curious, Rem and Ryuk both watched over her shoulders.

She was writing a message of some sort to someone named Frank, her grand uncle, Rem supposed. It read as followed:

Frank, I need help. Things in the shinigami world are same as usual, and I'm fine, but I need a recipe for pepper spray, the stronger the better, and I might need a lot of it, so if you could do the math for me, I'd love it, Gray. P.s. write it all on paper in big letters and leave it on the table. burn this piece of paper when you're done with it, thanks.

She folded it up small and tore a strip of rag from the bottom of the ragged trench coat she still wore as a "gift" from Gelus. She picked up a medium sized orck off the ground and tied all three together.

"You're planning on dropping it in the human world for Frank to find?" Rem guessed. It was very much the same method she had used to deliver messages to her as a child.

"Exactly," said Gray grimly, and she scurried over to the nearest viewing pool. Rem had showed her how t use it and direct it, to find certain people she knew. This she did and very soon, a view of the inside of a house appeared and the old man she lived with came into focus. He was sitting at the table and reading a book.

Gray dropped the rock and paper. It fell into the pool without a splash or a ripple and as they watched, it appeared on the table in front of Frank.

They watched as he jumped and looked up and picked the rock up and began untying it and read it through. He looked up and Rem knew he had no way of knowing he was being watched.

Ryuk chuckled.

"Now it's getting interesting," he said.

Frank left the paper, rock and strip of rag on the table and shuffled out of the kitchen and into another room. Gray quickly guided the pool to follow him, since she knew where every room in the house was.

Theyw atched as Frank did something at a computer console and wrote a list of things onto paper nearby using a thick, black marker.

He finished and Gray focused in on the paper Frank had written on.

"Tobasco sauce, garlic, ground up pepper seeds, salt, ammoniac acid... jeez, I won't be able to find all of this stuff here," muttered Gray, frowning.

"Except..." she said again, and her face lit up.

She reached into her bag once more and pulled out bruised looking apple skin. Ryuk's face brightened for a moment and Gray shushed him.

"I can get the acidic stuff from these if I grind them up somehow. Apples ferment and that stuff hurts," she said brightly. (A/N: I don't know how to make mace, the idiots on google have no fucking idea and I was too lazy to look more indepth, so I'm just picking out stuff that would hurt the most)

She jotted down what she would need on the back of her hand and picked up a small shard of bone in the dirt and dropped it in the human world, right on the floor at Frank's feet.

Rem supposed it was Gray's way of saying thanks.

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PLEASE REVIEW!


	13. Unfamiliar pains

Okay, I'm not sure if this will work... my laptop is the only computer I have access to and it won't download Word or even a simple RTF format, so I'm being forced to test out just a plain old text. We'll see if it downloads and if it doesn't, well, an update may take longer. Sorry.

On with it!

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Ryuk watched Gray as she wandered around the shinigami realm, looking for anything that might help her make mace.

"What are you lookin' for? Exactly?" he asked, trailing along behind her.

"Anything spicy. Anything at all. I'm willing to bet there's nothing like tobasco sauce up here, but if I can find something as equally spicy, maybe..." she trailed off.

"We have peppers and garlic up here, but nothing like what's down in the human world. Want me to take you to them?" he asked. What he wasn't saying was the things she was looking for would have little or no potency up here, where anything that happened to be growing was growing dead. He wasn't so sure about her initial plan, either. Plenty shinigami had tried getting past that dragon and so far they'd all died. No one even knew how the dragon came to exist anyway, since it had been there ever since he himself could remember and he was old by human standards.

He led her away from her path, towards a favorite hangout of his. A large boulder shaped oddly enough like a mushroom-shaped tree, with winding steps leading up and up until you were inside the huge stone belly in the sky. It was a great place to overlook plenty of the shinigami world. A lot of the only things growing were there. It was too bad the apples were shriveled and tasted like sand, though.

Beside him, she shivered violently. The jacket she wore, given to her by Gelus, he had heard, was thin and didn't offer much more than minimal warmth.

He had a cloak of sorts up in the only room inside the stone tree thathe supposed she could use until she went home.

IF she was allowed to go home.

He banished those thoughts almost immediately. What was wrong with him? For that matter, what was wrong with any of the shinigami that Gray had met? He had asked around, inconspicuous-like, and no one else wanted to see her dead either. It was strange for a shinigami to care so much about a human as much as Rem and Gelus appeared to, either. Gelus had stated rather boldly that he would help Rem do whatever it took to make sure Gray's life was spared.

That was what was strange. Shinigami existed solely to shorten lifespans and kill humans. Why any of them, including himself, cared anything for this half human was a mystery to him.

He didn't know, in other words. He just didn't want her to die.

"Penny for your thoughts," she said out of nowhere, looking at him as they walked.

Ryuk shrugged.

"Nothing," he grunted, and he flew on ahead. The stone tree was getting closer on the horizon. He turned back in the sky and waited for her to catch up.

As he flew up towards the stone room (letting her climb up on her own) he noticed that the only strange, unsettling thing about the dragon and the black tower was how both of them seemed to migrate across the land somehow. One day it would be in one place and the next week, they were almost to this place. As he looked out across the shinigami world, he saw both objects in the distance. The dragon was within 1000 yards, which meant it could almost reach them with its fire breath. Both he and Gray would have to tread carefully.

He grabbed his cloak, which was tattered and had a few holes in it but was thick enough to stave off cold and waited for Gray to make it to this place.

He listened for her footsteps but heard nothing. He did hear her fall, though.

The silence was pierced by a long, unbroken scream. He had never heard a human really scream like that and wasn't sure if it was a sound of pain or fear.

Regardless, it was the job of whoever accompanied her, per order of the old man himself, to make sure she remained safe for the time being. If she was screaming, there was something wrong.

He tossed the cloak over his shoulders because he didn't feel like carrying it and hurried down the stairs. He figured it would be faster to fly, so he did.

He came up short when he saw Gray huddled on the ground at the bottommost step, staring with huge orange eyes at something up above her. Her face was scratched and the jacket she had worn had been torn from her. Her t shirt was torn as well, revealing one bare shoulder and two more scratches from armpit to sternum. Her face was stark white and a single tear of absolute terror slid down her cheek.

He hid himself and peered around the corner, putting a finger to his lips to let her know to be silent.

He saw a shinigami or someone standing above her, wearing sharp black armor and a tattered cloak. There was a long sword at his waist and his face was masked. Only his eyes shone, fierce and red, from eye slits.

"Where is he?" the stranger demanded.

"I don't know who you're talking about," said Gray, sounding more like a child than the 18 year old that she was. She was afraid because she knew she could die, thouht Ryuk.

If this was the thing that lived in the black tower and controlled the dragon, then it was logical to assume that he COULD die, hence the mask and the hiding behind something as large and formidable as the dragon.

He stepped out, grabbed Gray by the wrist, jerked her up sharply and began running, all in a matter of seconds.

"FLY!" he growled, whipping his own wings out and beside him, she did too.

They flew as fast as they both could, him faster than her, but he was careful not to lose sight of her.

Something hit him from behind. He had forgotten to make himself transparent. Since he was solid at the moment, he felt his right wing shatter and it knocked him out of the air.

"RYUK!" Gray cried.

He did make himself transparent, and managed to float himself to relative safety, but Gray had been worried and hovered in the open sky, a perfect target. She seemed to realize this and quickly joined him on the ground.

Ryuk tried retracting his wings and found that with one as damaged as it appeared to be, he couldn't.

"Come on... I don't think he's following us any more," muttered Ryuk. Being hurt for the first time in his life had humbled him somewhat. He was no longer in the mood to be his usually cocky self.  
He looked behind them. The stone tree had disappeared off the horizon, as had the stranger in black armor. All around them were nothing but bramble bushes, thorns and chains, scraps of bone and skeletons everywhere. Gray tried getting him to sit but he refused, going transparent so she couldn't touch him.

"come on," he mumbled. He led her towards the carved out bowl of sand, ground and bone where most shinigami usually hng out with nothing to do. Maybe one of them could tell what to do about an injury. Even the word injury was foreign to a god of death. Nothing was supposed to be able to hurt them, yet the man in black armor and the dragon both could.

He walked on, not liking the feel of his broken and battered wing fluttering low to the ground while the other lay stretched out against the sky. He couldn't move the broken one. What had that guy thrown at him?

Up ahead, he saw the distant white figure of Rem. Gray jumped to the sky and flew on ahead.

Moments later, she came flying back with Rem, Gelus and Zallogi at he side. Rem's wings were white and bat-like with more angular membranes and Zellogi's were more like that of an eagle or large bird, with reddish-brown membrane and white and brown feathers. His feathered headdress blew in the wind.

They all landed and Ryuk stopped walking. For the first time in his life, he felt miserable. Not merely bored or happy or mischievious, but downright depressed. He didn't like being hurt. It made him feel weak... human.

"I didn'tbelieve it... Ryuk IS hurt," said Zellogi, walking around him and looking closer at the damaged wing that lay in the dirt. The feathers were filthy and if he looked back, he could see bits of bone, although there was no blood. He still couldn't bleed. It hurt, he faintly realized.

He could feel pain?

Maybe shinigami had more in common with humans than anyone was willing to believe...

"What happened?" asked Gelus. He had a soothing, low sort of voice for a shinigami, but then, he was a lot smaller than most. He motioned to Gray's ruined shirt and the deep scratches across her bared chest. Ryuk also noticed a strange red birthmark running down her chest, exposed seperately from the scratches because of its deeper color. She was female, of that no one had any doubts, but had no visible breasts, nor nipples. She was indeed part shinigami.

She tore the remainder of her shirt off, revealing the rest of her, which was genderless but curved slightly as were most human females. She fingered the edge of the scratch on her shoulder with vague interest and her finger came away bloodless. It had already stopped and dried.

"Here," said Rem, handing her her bag. She took to trusting the shhinigami with it when she had no use for it.

"Thanks," she said, taking it. She put it over her shoulders and sighed. She aroached him and he watched her with his eyes.

"Want me to see if I can help?" she asked.

"If you can, sure, but I doubt it. No shinigami has ever been hurt before," he muttered.

She walked behind him and he lost sight of her. He could see the eyes of Rem, Gelus and Zellogi trailing her, though and knew she was examining the broken wing. He felt gentle hands on the edge of it and winced as unfamiliar, shrp pain shot down his back.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Zellogi, tilting his head to the side.

"It hurts," he muttered, faintly embarassed to admit it.

"Wow... you say the man in the black tower did this? So he can hurt shinigami... I wonder what pain feels like," said Zellogi, muttering to himself more than anything.

A rock went flying and hit the shinigami on the side of the head and a voice behind Ryuk growled, "like that."

Gelus laughed and Rem allowed a rare smile. Gray was attempting to be funny and charming to mask something... Was it fear or pain? She wasn't hard to read.

He felt her gently probing the shattered bone and winced again as she hit some nerve or other.

"This is going to hurt a lot," she warned from behind him.

He braced himself for it. Gelus and the others watched, curious.

There was a hard, jerking feeling and his entire upper back exploded in bright red pain, bringing points of light to his vision.

He screamed as he had never EVER screamed before, digging his long clawed nails into the dirt.

The others jumped back, surprised to hear any shinigami scream in pain.

Once the pain subsided a bit, Ryuk discovered that he could move his wing a little better than before. Well, he could bend it at any rate, and he let Gray brush the dirt and mud off the featheres before he tried retracting them again. This time, it worked.

His back still twinged a bit, but nothing hurt. He almost felt ike himself again.

Then realization hit him. Not only had he been hurt himself, but he had saved the life of a human girl. Would he die as punishment? No shinigami was allowed to save lives... it was contrary to their nature.

He thought maybe it was time to visit Justin.

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Please review!! 


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